By Mark Jones
The norm is technology just gets better. Cars are better. The feeler gauges I used to adjust the valves in my first car still reside in the upper right drawer of my toolbox. I haven’t adjusted valves in decades. Same for my grease gun. There isn’t a grease zerk on my current car. Oil lasts 10,000 miles, three times my first car. I’m carrying more computing power and better connectivity in my pocket than existed in the entire Chemistry Department when I started graduate school. Computers have gotten better. Plastics better. Paints better. Toilets better. It is hard to find a technology area that isn’t better now than 20 years ago. (The Flint Water Crisis, which I’ve written about several times, was mercifully one of the rare examples of technology devolution, where working technology was rendered inoperable.)
Software stands out. There are many cases where it is getting worse. The report about AI advice for kidney stones caught my attention. Asking Google’s new AI-enhanced search, the Google Search Generative Experience, Google SGE, how to pass kidney stones quickly offers the advice to drink at least two quarts of urine every 24 hours. It is questionable advice and just the latest example of software getting worse. The brilliant Cory Doctorow gave it a name: enshitification. It so captures the times, the American Dialect Society made it the word of the year for 2023.
Enshitification certainly isn’t unique to Google, but Google’s importance makes its degradation particularly alarming. Water is critical infrastructure and so is Google Search. 90% of all search is Google, “Critical Infrastructure are those assets, systems, and networks that provide functions necessary for our way of life,” is a definition that surely includes Google Search. It is the definition offered by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA). CISA doesn’t directly name Google. The vague use of “necessary for life” encompasses Google Search. It is hard to imagine a day without search and Google is search. It fits the CISA critical infrastructure definition.
Search was crappy until Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank. It was genius. The algorithm and the simplicity of the results were amazing. The clutter plaguing other search was gone. Just 10 blue links on a white background. It was revolutionary. Google search is very different today. My search now begins with paid ads and YouTube videos, a property owned by Google. I have to page down twice to get below the trash. The poor results from SGE just add distraction.
The enshitification of the Flint Water System was driven by cost cutting. Ineptitude did the rest as ignorance drove bad decisions. The enshitification of Google is also driven by money. As Doctorow notes, in enshitification of services, the user is forgotten in the quest for more profit. It is a conscious effort. Google knows they are enshitifying. Appending udm=14 to any search is a switch that turns back the clock. It transports back in time to provide Google Search the way it used to be. Enshitification can be undone because it was done on purpose.
Undo’s don’t happen often in life but are a feature of software. It is what separates Flint, a real-world enshitification, from the enshitification of Google search, a software issue. There was no undo for the water, no undo for ineptitude.
Filed Under: Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking
